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Patients, Too, Turn to the Internet for Fund-Raising

Peter W. Cross for The New York TimesJessica Haley, with her husband, Sean, posted an online appeal to raise money for fertility treatment.

On Jessica Haley’s 28th birthday in June, she posted a wish on the fund-raising Web site IndieGoGo. Ms. Haley and her husband, Sean, of Melbourne, Fla., wanted a baby, but their insurance did not cover fertility treatment.

To their astonishment, donations started pouring in. Word of the couple’s plight spread on Twitter and Facebook, and a “Help the Haleys Have a Baby” campaign raised $8,050 — including $423 from a total stranger.

“It was miraculous — I can barely talk about it still,” Ms. Haley said. “It was this hidden community that lifted us up and was helping us through this really difficult time.”

Online fund-raising — a common tactic for nonprofit groups and charity events — is starting to spread to the world of costly health care. Although some Web sites do not accept such personal appeals (Ms. Haley’s was rejected by the first site she tried), dozens of health-oriented campaigns have appeared on IndieGoGo in recent months.

They cover a wide range of needs, from small medical expenses to extensive cancer treatments and even organ transplants. The family of a man with Parkinson’s disease is trying to raise money to offset the costs of his care. In Florida and Texas, families are trying to raise money to cover costs for two men with advanced colon cancer. Friends of a 26-year-old Brooklyn man who suffered a spinal cord injury are seeking $25,000.

Posting to IndieGoGo is free, but the site takes 4 percent of the money raised. (To encourage users to set reasonable goals, the site imposes a 9 percent fee if a campaign falls short of the fund-raising goal.) Slava Rubin, who helped found IndieGoGo in 2008, says successful health-oriented campaigns on the site now number in the “hundreds.”

For Mr. Rubin, 33, it is a personal matter. He was just 15 when his father died of multiple myeloma. He uses the site himself for Music Against Myeloma, an annual charity event, as well as other cancer fund-raising campaigns.

“We created a funding platform that was purposefully very open, so when people used it for personal health it wasn’t shocking to us,” he said. “I think health care issues and personal health campaigns make sense, because our health care system can be very expensive sometimes. Sometimes people just need to try a different direction to get funded what they need to get funded.”

To prevent fraud, the site requires campaign sponsors to provide information about their bank account, and it uses a fraud algorithm to detect suspicious activity. But ultimately, Mr. Rubin said, it is “the crowd” that decides if a cause is legitimate.

Most campaigns will not get off the ground without initial support from family and friends. Most campaigns receive about 80 percent of donations from networks of friends, and friends of friends, while about 20 percent of the donations come from strangers.

Last winter, Jeffery Self, a 24-year-old actor and writer in Los Angeles, broke a tooth that later became infected and required at least $3,400 in dental surgery and repair. Lacking insurance, he feared he would lose a newly booked acting job because he could not afford to fix his tooth.

But after seeing friends raise money online to support independent films and music, Mr. Self made a humorous video for IndieGoGo, appealing for $1 and $2 donations for dental work. (“Hi, my name is Jeffery Self,” he begins with a snaggle-toothed smile, “and I didn’t always look like this.”) To his surprise, he raised $3,650.

“I said, ‘I know this is really weird crazy and strange, but I’m desperate and I need your help,’ ” he explained in an interview. “People want to use the Internet for good. We are so oversaturated with bad stuff on the Internet, when the opportunity comes to help each other out, I think it’s nice to do it.”

Daniel Weiss, a filmmaker and writer in Maui, Hawaii, has created slide shows and videos for IndieGoGo health fund-raisers to help several of his friends. It started when he heard of a friend’s 7-year-old niece with macular degeneration who wanted to see London and Paris before losing her sight. The campaign raised $5,075 toward travel costs.

“They might lose their home, but even if we don’t meet our goal it will certainly help them in their situation,” said Mr. Weiss, who says he does not charge for his services. “It’s astonishing and heartwarming to feel the compassion coming from a complete stranger.”

Ms. Haley says the downside of public fund-raising is the requirement to discuss her private struggles with infertility. Several women posted their own supportive stories, although a few people criticized her for not pursuing adoption. (Ms. Haley said she and her husband had not ruled it out.)

While most donors were friends or friends of friends, she said, about 20 percent appeared to be total strangers.

Recently, Ms. Haley returned to her IndieGoGo page, but not to raise more money. This time she posted news: She is pregnant. Mr. Rubin, the site’s co-founder, now refers to the event as “the first crowd-funded baby.”

“I cried millions of times that day out of pure excitement and joy,” Ms. Haley said. “It was amazing to get all that support through a computer.”